Carole Baskin made her debut performance on Dancing With the Stars last night, but her glory was interrupted by a sinister reminder of her ex-husband’s disappearance and now she’s spoken out about the entire ordeal…
The Tiger King star has joined this year’s Dancing With the Stars line up…
But her debut performance last night was tarnished with something a little more sinister.
And they made sure it was aired during the first episode of DWTS, where Carole’s debut dance took place.
Just before Carole was set to take to the stage.
Now, for years now, Carole has been embroiled in controversy regarding Don’s sudden disappearance.
So, what are the facts?
Well, on the morning of August 18, 1997, Carole’s millionaire husband, Don Lewis, vanished at the age of sixty. His car was later found at a nearby airport.
Some of Don’s relatives speculated that Carole was involved in his disappearance.
In fact, this claim was made by the oldest of Don’s 4 children, Donna Pettis, then forty-two, back in 1998.
She claimed that Carole feeding his body to the big cats would be “a perfect scenario to dispose of someone. We were upset that the cops didn’t test the DNA on the meat grinder.”
He was not granted the order.
Carole has repeatedly protested her innocence, and says that any claims made that she fed her husband to the big cats are “ludicrous.”
And to this day, nobody has been charged with anything to do with his disappearance.
Carole and her current husband, Howard, have been subjected to constant abuse online.
Speaking to the New York Post, she said:
“He’s [Joe Exotic] been trying, since 2009, to get his minions to kill me. He was constantly going on his internet show, saying that he has to get rid of me. It was very disturbing. The kinds of people who back up what he does are not stable people. It would be one thing if he went out to mainstream America. But he was going out to a group of whack-jobs.”
Pointing out in a blog post that her tigers eat meat broken down into 1-inch cubes before being ground in her tabletop meat grinder, she said:
“The idea that a human body could be put through it is idiotic.”
It looks like Carole has a new venture on the horizon.
Carole has joined the cast of this year’s Dancing With The Stars.
Who’d have thought it?
“The biggest thing for me is the longer my partner and I can stay in the running and in the competition it will keep the cats forefront in the viewers’ eye, and to me that was where Tiger King missed the ball,” she said.
“It really should have been focused on the animals and I’m hoping Dancing with the Stars will do that. I am competitive but I am competitive with myself I want to do the very best that I can possibly do.”
Including Backstreet Boys’ AJ McLean, Selling Sunset’s Chrishell Stause, former Bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe, former NFL player Vernon Davis, Jesse Metcalfe, Skai Jackson, Catfish host Nev Schulman, Grammy Award-winning rapper Nelly, and Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir, to name a few.
It certainly came as a shock.
And it was pretty much everything we had ever expected.
Of course.
And she received a score of just eleven points from the judges, ultimately placing her at the bottom of the leaderboard.
The heartbroken family of her missing ex-husband filmed a commercial appealing for more details surrounding his disappearance, and it aired during the first episode of DWTS, where Carole took to the stage.
Don’s daughters, Gale, Lynda, and Donna, his former assistant, Anne McQueen, and family attorney, John Phillips, thought it would be a good time to plead for information on his whereabouts.
And each noted the impact it has had on their lives.
“Do you know who did this? Or if Carole Baskin was involved?”
As has a tip line, which was advertised along the bottom of the ad.
“Someone, a reporter I won’t name, made sure that I knew about it 10 minutes before going out on the dance floor tonight and you can see that it did not keep me from bringing the best performance of my 2 weeks of learning.”